Kill Screen's Top 25 Games of 2015

hosannainexcelsis said:
The art is cute.
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Dee Dee said:
The fact that you do nothing is part of the appeal though. At least for me.
It reminds me a lot of Animal Crossing in that regard, chill and everything in it's own time.
I am honestly surprised how much I enjoy it, and it seems there are at least dozens like me. Dozens, I tell you!
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There is something strangly addicting, but I think its just me expecting something interesting to happen. So, once I buy everything in the store, have photos of every cat, collect every gift, then what?
 
Decent list, but more importantly good write ups for each entry even if you don't agree with it. Bloodborne and TW3 write ups were spot on. Give it a click fellas.
 
Neat list and great write ups. I only vaguely knew of Kill Screen, but now that I poke around their site it seems really interesting. Will definitely pay more attention in the future.
 
Bloodborne write-up:

“You’re in the know, right?”

Of all the things you find squirming and shaking down the streets of Yharnam, none are more curious than that message. It’s a sentence that hunters can leave in the skinless hands of the game’s messengers, who unroll the text to show players in other worlds. Placed in front of a window, the words prompt you to break the glass; over by a ledge, they cue you to look for the rifleman waiting below. For new players, the hint just means look again. But it serves another purpose for returning hunters, the second- and third-timers who already know what it means to visit Iosefka’s door or watch the grasping blue light outside Cathedral Ward. For those inducted into the game’s mysteries, the message is a sort of secret handshake. And anyone preoccupied with the game’s peculiar definition of insight may find the choice of words sinister: in Yharnam, to be “in the know” is to be insane.

Making players speak and think in the game’s own voice is one of the Souls series’ oldest tricks. The famous warning of the first game was self-mythologizing: “The true Demon’s Souls starts here.” In the more muscular Dark Souls, “Praise the sun!” became a catchphrase soon after release. In Bloodborne, a game fixated on knowledge and madness, the language is allusive and faintly derisive. It won’t just come out and say “you know what to do”; the question tag, “right,” is there to doubt that the player really understands. Sometimes when you find the question glowing on the cobblestones of an empty alley, or printed on the rheumy turf of a nightmare, the useless clue reads as a taunt.

This is all to say that the dread you feel when first exploring Bloodborne never really evaporates, even after you’ve joined the society of players who are truly, exhaustively in the know. You can process all the grand revelations—the “eldritch truth” found after killing Rom, the final descent of the Moon Presence—and feel like the whole cosmology is almost within your reach. You can learn to whip feet at the periphery of the threaded cane’s range until their owners topple over, or sweep the Holy Moonlight Sword over beasts close enough to eat both the blade and the cosmic wave riding on it. (“Cosmic” effects in Bloodborne can be at times as ubiquitous as Kirby Krackle, though the look is completely different.) You can fine-tune your “rally potential” and blood tap until you puke bullets. But you can never relax. Even when you have the world mapped in your head, it doesn’t settle; it feels like a curtain that might draw back to reveal a greater secret.

The Souls games are famous for their oppressive difficulty, which is the legend that Demon’s Souls wanted players to write on its own floors. But after you learned their tricks, they lightened up; the second run was a victory lap. In Bloodborne it’s the atmosphere, not the layout, that oppresses you. Play it again and it’s still heavy. It’s still keyed up. It’s still, by design, unknowable.
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I really don't get the love Everybody's Gone to the Rapture gets from some outlets. It's probably the slowest game I have ever played, both in terms of movement speed and story telling.
 
tuxfool said:
Not from these guys:
https://killscreen.com/articles/the-pointless-scale-of-xenoblade-chronicles-x/

They hated it.
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Nice review.

Aaron D. said:
Yup.

Just downloaded Neko Atsume (free) on my phone in roughly 5 seconds.

Also added Sylvio to my Steam Wishlist.
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Yeah I just did the same. I also purchased Downwell.

potatohead said:
Thanks for input guys, I will be looking to buy TW3 soon :)
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I hope you enjoy :) The OT is friendly if you have any questions.
 
Think of a scene in the game, any scene, and how much care and craftsmanship it exudes from every pixel, every sound, every word, every aesthetic and narrative choice.
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That's exactly how I've been trying to explain the game.
 
Denton said:
Again, so good. I might add the site to my bookmarks or something.



Yeah the writer didn't really hate it, it was just really disappointing to him after the original Xenoblade.

Man, those comments under that review..
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Those comments are embarrassing. It's because of individuals such as those that many sites basically adhere to a 7-10 scale.
 
DNAbro said:
That was a good read.
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Yeah, regardless whether you agree with any of their reviews, they are always a good read.

This particular article also is a good read, and explains one aspect of why they hold the witcher 3 in such high regard. They touch upon it in the second paragraph of their GOTY description.

https://killscreen.com/articles/lets-talk-about-rosa-var-attre-impossible-romance-witcher-3/

More_Badass said:
5/10 = hated it?
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"THE POINTLESS SCALE OF XENOBLADE CHRONICLES X"
 
Man those read like a best-of from any great GAF review thread. Objective reviews, "pretentious," git guds...every box is checked. Pretty embarrassing.
 
In addition to their writeup here, y'all should make sure you actually read their original review on TW3 too. It's delightful.

An excerpt:

The results may not be up to the Bard’s standards, but they’re always inventive. The game’s dialogue rolls along in its own rhythms, with undercurrents of humor and compassion that build quietly and then strike you all of a sudden. The extravagant profanity is only the most visible evidence of a robust and unusual vocabulary. All of the Witcher games share a deep reverence for their source material—Andrzej Sapkowski’s books about the mutated monster hunter Geralt of Rivia—but they now far exceed the English translations of those stories in their mastery of language. The game can verge on parody in its relish for the lilting tones of a heiress or the ‘umble suggestions of a farmer, but it manages to wring humor and pathos out of virtually everyone, in all their diverse modes of speech. Like Gone Home, it’s one of those scripts that reminds you of how badly written most games really are.

There’s such a surplus of great lines that many are dropped unannounced in the background or spoken in quests most players will never find. “In this hole, this reasty mire … what could go right here?” a character muses. As looters pick over the bodies on a battlefield, one urges his fellows: “Hurry, afore the corpse-eaters wamble out.” A man bleeding out on the floor of a tavern asks a witness to “Pour me a nip atimes.” A servant scrubbing mansion floors mutters that “Nothing hurts so much as life.”

In these and other inconsequential scenes, minor characters are suddenly invested with life by a team of writers who hold themselves to a higher standard than anyone else working in their genre. Would a company like Bioware ever trust their audience to know the word “reasty”? They spent a whole development cycle making one city, and they named the bad part of it “Darktown.”
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Ratrat said:
There is something strangly addicting, but I think its just me expecting something interesting to happen. So, once I buy everything in the store, have photos of every cat, collect every gift, then what?
Click to expand...

I'm getting close to that point. I find I've been playing less. I mostly just drop by now and then to refill the food dishes, but sometimes I change the decorations to whatever I feel like.

It's still a decent game that's strangely relaxing, but it's really more of a virtual fishtank than a game. Seeing it in 5th place is hilarious.
 
Akuun said:
I'm getting close to that point. I find I've been playing less. I mostly just drop by now and then to refill the food dishes, but sometimes I change the decorations to whatever I feel like.

It's still a decent game, but seeing it in 5th place is hilarious.
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Is it one of those clicker games?
 
This article describes one of the things that Undertale does well:
https://killscreen.com/articles/the-year-of-mom/

Don't read if you haven't played the game.

Excerpt:

There’s no doubt that Toby Fox’s Undertale relies on the inhumanly selfless portrait of motherhood, but it does so with a purpose (warning that spoilers abound for the game). Early on, after the player-character accidentally falls into the monster world, you meet a momish character named Toriel. Toriel wishes to protect your from all the harm human children face in the monster world, and teaches you that, when you meet a foe, you will have the option to fight (and gain experience points) or to show them mercy by figuring out a narrative puzzle that sorts out that foe’s issues. But the real catch of this revolutionary kind of anti-combat system comes midway through the game, when you are forced to fight Toriel herself as she stands in the way of your progress. Toriel has watched several human children die at the hands of the monster king, Asgore, who seeks revenge on the human world for trapping the monsters underground. She refuses to let you continue in fear that you will die at the king’s hand, and you in turn are left with a crucial choice.

The battle with Toriel is a long and arduous one if you choose to not attack her. Showing her mercy requires you to repeat the same difficult process over and over again, probably dying often, which only extends the battle even longer. Throughout, there is no indication that your non-lethal tactics are even working, causing many players to give up and just kill her. You murder Toriel because you don’t know what else to do—because it appears to be your only option. You murder Toriel because the Kingdom of Fathers has defined videogames through the language of gaining power at the expense of the mother. Later on, you learn that Toriel once ruled the monster world alongside Asgore. But when the king began to murder human children, Toriel gave up her crown and cast herself into the Ruins, dedicating the rest of her life to saving humanity.

Most players kill Toriel on their first playthrough, even if they’re aware of the game’s morality system. But this choice, rather than serving as a reflection of the player’s lack of moral fiber, instead holds the mirror up to videogames themselves. This, Undertale says, is the kind of player patriarchal game design produces: impatient, quick to quit, and more than willing to sacrifice their own mother and humanity in the name of…what, even? Progress? A positive feedback loop? This vague and arguably meaningless concept of “leveling up” through “experience points”—whatever the fuck that even means in this context?

Undertale does more than just criticize paternal game design, though. It presents the beginning of a solution. Instead of relying on an abstract system of damage and violence to resolve every single combative interaction the player encounters, Undertale gives you the chance to engage with each individual enemy on a human level. If you choose, you can pay attention to what they say: to their wants, needs, and experiences in order to win. Arguably, doing that even makes for a much better game. This kind of game design also thinks more of a you as a player, intellectually-speaking, than the kind of game that names you king for pressing a button faster than another person. Undertale’s game design not only respects your ability to think through a problem, but also your basic instincts as a human being.

Which brings us back to the other million dollar question: why, despite all logic, is motherhood considered too boring, lame, or otherwise undeserving of its own explorations in pop culture, particularly videogames? Publishers literally throw money at designers who want to create a game about a violent paternal journey. But titles like Might and Delight’s Shelter and Shelter 2—which casts the player as a mother in the animal kingdom—are forced to subsist on meagre funds. But what makes one gender’s system of motivations and instincts more interesting or valuable or even “game-y” than the other? Why is destruction inherently more “fun” than creation? Because, from where I’m standing, motherhood should, by all logic and definition, be seen as the ultimate experience of empowerment. As anyone who has birthed a project—from a novel to a building to a business to a videogame—can attest to, you must endure a long and difficult gestation period before you produce work that you can feel truly proud of. So imagine that, but in the creation of a human person. Now imagine that, but as the guiding principle of game design.

As games like Undertale show, maternal game design isn’t just about telling worthwhile yet disregarded stories. The popularity of paternal game design is indicative of deeper issues, ranging from how we as a society measure success and who and what our laws protect. But one thing is clear. As Rich says, “the mother’s battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.”
 
I was frowning at the lack of Xenoblade Chronicles X but then I saw it did not even have Splatoon in the list... I guess the only plausible explanation is that the author does not game on Nintendo platforms
 
orthodoxy1095 said:
In addition to their writeup here, y'all should make sure you actually read their original review on TW3 too. It's delightful.

An excerpt:
Click to expand...

In these and other inconsequential scenes, minor characters are suddenly invested with life by a team of writers who hold themselves to a higher standard than anyone else working in their genre. Would a company like Bioware ever trust their audience to know the word “reasty”? They spent a whole development cycle making one city, and they named the bad part of it “Darktown.”
Click to expand...

Wow, fucking burn.

I need to check out Kill Screen.
 
No Splatoon, Mario Maker, Yoshi, Kirby, Tembo, or Xeno X. AND Her Story is on the list and above Undertale, LiS, and Beginner's Guide (which-massive spoiler:
does unreliable narrator in a much more organic and genuine manner than Her Story
)

I'll give them this, the list is sorta varied at the very least. That said too, I very much like their write-up on Undertale. I also appreciate that they acknowledged the Shelter games.
 
Nice to see more people discovering Kill Screen. It's one of the best sites out there if you want to learn about great indie games and lesser known titles and they have really interesting articles
 
RespectThySole said:
This article describes one of the things that Undertale does well:
https://killscreen.com/articles/the-year-of-mom/

Don't read if you haven't played the game.

Excerpt:

There’s no doubt that Toby Fox’s Undertale relies on the inhumanly selfless portrait of motherhood, but it does so with a purpose (warning that spoilers abound for the game). Early on, after the player-character accidentally falls into the monster world, you meet a momish character named Toriel. Toriel wishes to protect your from all the harm human children face in the monster world, and teaches you that, when you meet a foe, you will have the option to fight (and gain experience points) or to show them mercy by figuring out a narrative puzzle that sorts out that foe’s issues. But the real catch of this revolutionary kind of anti-combat system comes midway through the game, when you are forced to fight Toriel herself as she stands in the way of your progress. Toriel has watched several human children die at the hands of the monster king, Asgore, who seeks revenge on the human world for trapping the monsters underground. She refuses to let you continue in fear that you will die at the king’s hand, and you in turn are left with a crucial choice.

The battle with Toriel is a long and arduous one if you choose to not attack her. Showing her mercy requires you to repeat the same difficult process over and over again, probably dying often, which only extends the battle even longer. Throughout, there is no indication that your non-lethal tactics are even working, causing many players to give up and just kill her. You murder Toriel because you don’t know what else to do—because it appears to be your only option. You murder Toriel because the Kingdom of Fathers has defined videogames through the language of gaining power at the expense of the mother. Later on, you learn that Toriel once ruled the monster world alongside Asgore. But when the king began to murder human children, Toriel gave up her crown and cast herself into the Ruins, dedicating the rest of her life to saving humanity.

Most players kill Toriel on their first playthrough, even if they’re aware of the game’s morality system. But this choice, rather than serving as a reflection of the player’s lack of moral fiber, instead holds the mirror up to videogames themselves. This, Undertale says, is the kind of player patriarchal game design produces: impatient, quick to quit, and more than willing to sacrifice their own mother and humanity in the name of…what, even? Progress? A positive feedback loop? This vague and arguably meaningless concept of “leveling up” through “experience points”—whatever the fuck that even means in this context?

Undertale does more than just criticize paternal game design, though. It presents the beginning of a solution. Instead of relying on an abstract system of damage and violence to resolve every single combative interaction the player encounters, Undertale gives you the chance to engage with each individual enemy on a human level. If you choose, you can pay attention to what they say: to their wants, needs, and experiences in order to win. Arguably, doing that even makes for a much better game. This kind of game design also thinks more of a you as a player, intellectually-speaking, than the kind of game that names you king for pressing a button faster than another person. Undertale’s game design not only respects your ability to think through a problem, but also your basic instincts as a human being.

Which brings us back to the other million dollar question: why, despite all logic, is motherhood considered too boring, lame, or otherwise undeserving of its own explorations in pop culture, particularly videogames? Publishers literally throw money at designers who want to create a game about a violent paternal journey. But titles like Might and Delight’s Shelter and Shelter 2—which casts the player as a mother in the animal kingdom—are forced to subsist on meagre funds. But what makes one gender’s system of motivations and instincts more interesting or valuable or even “game-y” than the other? Why is destruction inherently more “fun” than creation? Because, from where I’m standing, motherhood should, by all logic and definition, be seen as the ultimate experience of empowerment. As anyone who has birthed a project—from a novel to a building to a business to a videogame—can attest to, you must endure a long and difficult gestation period before you produce work that you can feel truly proud of. So imagine that, but in the creation of a human person. Now imagine that, but as the guiding principle of game design.

As games like Undertale show, maternal game design isn’t just about telling worthwhile yet disregarded stories. The popularity of paternal game design is indicative of deeper issues, ranging from how we as a society measure success and who and what our laws protect. But one thing is clear. As Rich says, “the mother’s battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.”
Click to expand...

Actually...

The battle with Toriel is incredibly easy - just don't do anything in the bullet segment & the bullets will avoid killing you.
 
Cool list, some games that I didn't know of. Lol at Neko Atsume making it. I guess that student of mine that kept ironically (or was she?) pushing me to get it had a point after all. Really don't agree with the order of the list though, but okay, horses for courses. The one game that seems criminally overlooked is Splatoon. Like how can you have any kind of pretension and ignore that game.
 
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